you are supportive of your partner when they are struggling – and this isn’t a big deal

The researchers in the States asked almost 500 men to imagine catching the eye of a woman in a nightclub. She smiles back. They were then asked to place, on a scale, how interested they think she is – from “not at all interested” to “extremely interested”.

The men were also asked to indicate whether they thought they tended towards attachment anxiety or attachment avoidance.

Men who displayed higher attachment anxiety are more likely to presume that the woman is interested in them. The is partly due to their hunger for intimacy: they project their own flirtatiousness onto the woman.

“If you view yourself as being flirtatious, that biases you to seeing others as behaving similarly,’ Joshua Hart, associate professor of psychology and the lead author of the study.

Those higher in attachment avoidance were less likely to assume interest on the woman’s part.

“Their lower interest in intimacy led them to be less interested in the fictional woman,” Hart concludes.”Thus seeing themselves as being less flirty, and in turn, imagining the woman as less sexually interested in them.’

In matters of the heart, it’s selective vision; we see what we want to see.